All the Birds in the Sky in Around the World in 80 Books

May 10, 2020 Nina ( picturetalk321 ) rated it liked it

Shelves: author-woman, a-reviewed, usa, z-read-gelesen-2020, genre-scifi, zchallenge-2020-reading-women, genre-fiction, author-trans, theme-distributed-personhood

This was fabulous and 5-star-material up until round about the 60% when it rapidly lost momentum, charm and focus. The premise, along the lines of the adage that any technology advanced enough will be the same as magic and the meeting of magic/technology alongside the concomitant genre mix of fantasy/sci fi, was highly promising and, so I thought, worked really well for the first three chapters out of five. The first chapter thrusts one into a strange world where it's not clear what is childish This was fabulous and 5-star-material up until round about the 60% when it rapidly lost momentum, charm and focus. The premise, along the lines of the adage that any technology advanced enough will be the same as magic and the meeting of magic/technology alongside the concomitant genre mix of fantasy/sci fi, was highly promising and, so I thought, worked really well for the first three chapters out of five. The first chapter thrusts one into a strange world where it's not clear what is childish imagination and what is real, with the juvenile protagonists flying and inventing time machines. The second chapter where the protagonists are teenagers was my favourite: a screen-scrolling amalgam of school bullying, mystery assassin, family psychological conflict, coming of age and outrageous invention. The third chapter picks up our protagonists in early adulthood and continued to serve up fresh and intriguing moments -- but then, alas, it all went downhill. The plot threads, so skillfully set up in the first half, come apart; there are some moments of revelation, yes, but they tend to come too late (I 'got' this 50 pages ago and now you're doing the big reveal?); some elaborately set-up ingredients kind of fizzle out and there's an awful lot of deus ex machina and big-explosions type climax without the requisite emotional climax to go along with it. And I lost interest in the two protagonists and sort of didn't care about them any longer.

There is an apocalypse plotline that takes over in the last 40%, and I am wondering if I can ever read fictional apocalypses in the same way now that I am living through an actual apocalypse. I realise that so much that seems 'realistic' in apocalypse fiction - the looting, the burning, the mugging, the clogged motorways - mimics versimilitude through generic convention. We believe in the looting and the motorways because we've seen them and read about them in countless other apocalypse fictions. So in this book, these aspects seemed stock ingredients pulled out of a hat and not thought through or fit-for-purpose.

One very nice thing that I liked, especially in the first brilliant half of the book, was the way it slots into aspects of my own world with the non-binary identities, the asexual people, the diversity, the 'cool' slang, the casual use of devices, the geek-o-sphere.

There was also some amazing prose in the first half: 'arms like snail necks', the cat thinks birds 'are like toys with meat inside'. I also appreciated the interweaving of intellectual asides which reminded me of 1950s children's books where an omniscient narrator addresses readers directly with universal truths: 'He had already figured out a great universal truth, that people never asked for documentation of anything, as long as you asked them for documentation first.' 'Much like the inability to distinguish between "x-or" and "and/or", the lack of delineation between "x-we" and "in-we" was a conspiracy of obfuscation.' 'Boredom is the mind's scar tissue'. (and other gems)

Format: I have no complaints about this e-book.

Provenance: Borrowed via a special corona two-month Kindle Unlimited trial.

Read for the Reading Women Challenge 2020, rubric 'LGBTQ author' (Anders is trans). ...more

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Jul 10, 2017 MichelleCH rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, ya-literature, scifi-fantasy, group-reads, contemporary-fic, kindle, dystopian, end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it

This started out so strong and I very much enjoyed the initial character development and ridiculous bits. It's a quirky and interesting beginning and I loved all about Patricia. A nice combination of magical realism and post-apocalyptic fiction.

The novel revolves around Patricia (a witch) and Laurence (Larry- a techno geek) who both spend their childhood as outcasts and through that experience become comrades as the odd person out in every setting. After their childhood the second part of story ...more

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